#NuevasPáginas is a space that aims to amplify and spotlight Hispanic/Latine/x authors with newly published books. The goal is to connect readers to their next favorite Hispanic/Latine/x authored book through a mini casual get-to-know-the-book-and-author interview. So please help me connect to more readers. So that together we can continue to build the love/support of Latine literature!
Hey Book Franz!
How are you? Give me more than “fine”, I want to know - how really are you doing? With so much going on in the world I’m concerned there aren’t enough online spaces in which people can be open and honest (if they want to be) about how they are really doing. Whether it’s sad, overwhelmed, feeling hopeless, happy, grateful, etc - I’m truly asking because I want to know. So drop a comment below if you feel like it.
I’ve been busy, overwhelmed, heartbroken, and at times full of gratitude/happiness. It has been difficult to allow myself the multitudes of emotions I feel daily but I’m trying. I also know it’s been more than a month since I posted an interview with an author here in this space and it’s not because I don’t have any interviews sitting in my inbox - it’s because life happens and since this isn’t my full-time job, some things need to be dropped so I can juggle other things like my actual full-time job and my responsibilities as a mother/wife, trying to maintain a presence on the other social media channels I’ve created or even just being someone who wants to spend time opening a book and reading it (this last one isn’t happening a lot though these past few weeks <insert sad face>). That said, please know I am always thinking about this space. Thinking about all the things I want to write to you all about and the authors I can’t wait to spotlight here.
I didn’t mean to turn this into a mini venting session about the reasons why I haven’t been posting here but I have been thinking a lot about it because I often get asked “how I do it all”. My typical answer is “I don’t”. I do what I can when I can, and I try really hard not to feel guilty about the things I can’t get to immediately. So I deeply thank you for your patience and for allowing me to sneak back into your inboxes whenever I can <3 It’s deeply appreciated. Thank you for sticking around.
If you are an author reading this that has submitted an interview - I will make sure to push out as many interviews as I can before the end of the year. Thank you for your patience.
What is Lupita reading this week?
I know I said above that not a lot of reading is getting done and that is partly true. I’m not reading as many physical books as I’d like to be reading or reading them as fast as I’d like to be reading them!
📕 Physical book - ‘Blackouts’ by Justin Torres!!!! YES, I’M READING THE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION THIS YEARRRRR! I’ve been reading it for what feels like a month now because it’s so freaking good and I don’t want it to end. It’s probably my favorite book of the year and I’m only halfway through it. I don’t know if many folks know that but I had the chance to attend the National Book Awards in person this year (it’s basically like the Oscars but for books if you aren’t familiar) and I flipped out when they announced Justin as this year’s winner. Also, Oprah walked by me!!! She was just an arm’s length away (there’s a story there if you want to hear it or hear about the entire evening, for my paid subscribes -let me know if you’d be into a newsletter about that!) and I saw Kerry Washington (though I didn’t ask her for a picture because my wife taught me early on in our relationship to leave celebrities alone because they are regular people that don’t like to be bothered- still I wish I would have asked both for photos lol). Mainly, I got to celebrate a queer Latine-authored book win a major award — from that I will never recover and my hope is that many more queer Latine books will win more awards which will result in the gates opening up to more and more queer Latine writers out there and our stories.
🎧 Audiobook - I’ve spent so much more time listening to audiobooks these days and I am flying through really great nonfiction — that’s my preference for audiobooks. I’m currently making my way through ‘Congratulations, The Best Is Over’ by R. Eric Thomas. I just started so I don’t have much to say but I will say if you loved his first collection of essays (which I did) “Here For It”, you might be into his second collection.
Without further ado, our special guest author for today’s Nuevas Pagina issue is…Alma Garćia author of All That Rises
Could you tell me a bit about where this photo was taken? Is it special to your book in some way?
I was literally on the banks of the Rio Grande—in northern New Mexico. That’s to say, this is the part of the river that veers north toward Colorado, not the part that flows south and forms the Texas-Mexico border. All That Rises is set in El Paso, Texas, where the Rio Grande is a powerful and inescapable presence; Ciudad Juárez is clearly visible on the other side. Little wonder, then, that the river is a touchstone for many of the novel’s characters. It’s almost its own character.
That said, if I had been able to be in the right place at the right time and had taken a similar shot in El Paso, it would have been a very different photo. The part of the river captured here is as nature intended it. There’s no concrete, no barbwire, no lines or crowds or uniforms. It’s just you and the water and the earth and the sun.
In fact, I was so completely in my element that it hadn’t even occurred to me that I forgot to bring the book with me. See instead the photo of my novel sitting on the window in front of my writing desk at my home in Seattle. Note the gloom, the grays and greens, the rain on the windowpane—all of which have been strangely necessary for creating the sense of perspective, time, space, imagination, and memory required for writing a novel set in one of the two desert cities where I grew up and where I am still deeply connected.
Tell me about your book without telling me about your book - share any literary inspirations behind your book! If there are none, the gap you wanted to fill in the literary canon with your book
Sometimes writers feel a strong compulsion to write about the places that made them who they are, that shaped their outlook on the world as well as their perceptions of themselves (that’s to say, the place they consider to be “home” …although “home” can be a complicated concept that sometimes means more than one place; I’ve lived in Seattle since 2001). Sometimes a writer might feel frustrated that they have seen very little attention given to this homeplace on the national literary scene (though let’s give props to some of El Paso’s contemporary literary luminaries: Sergio Troncoso, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Daniel Chacón, and for a time, Dagoberto Gilb).
In other words, I’ve always had an instinctive desire to tell stories about the kinds of people I grew up with in the desert Southwest—people with their feet in more than one world (or more than one culture), who are inextricably connected to the historical legacies, geography, and ever-evolving politics of the borderlands—especially in a time when what happens at the Texas/Mexico border has implications far beyond the borderlands themselves.
Also, although there is at least one historical literary godmother (looking at you, Estela Portillo-Trambley) you might note that when it comes to adult literary fiction, there seems to be a shortage of contemporary women novelists who have tackled this very particular world.
What are two central themes in your book that you connect with the most and why?
I’m gonna give you three. The border is a place that both divides and joins. It’s always about duality—where you “belong,” and where you do not belong. It’s also a powerful metaphor, and this metaphor can manifest itself in the psychological and emotional borders people create between themselves. When people become entangled with one another—whether by accident or intention or geographical location or by blood relation—the boundaries between them sometimes blur in unexpected ways. Where, then, does one person’s concerns end and another’s begin? Who is “us” and who is “them”?
Two: History repeats itself, for real, no matter how many times we think humanity has surely learned its lessons. This book is set in 2005, when the border was first beginning to undergo the changes that have led to the realities of today. We could have seen a lot of things coming, had we but known to look for them. As one character in the novel puts it, “The problem with history is that by the time you see it’s repeating itself, it’s already happened.”
Three: Personal identity can be a slippery, surprising, and ever-changeable thing. So much of who we are depends on the context. So much depends on our relationship to what we recognize as “home”.
If a book was home, where would your home be?
Ha! Is that what I’ve been looking for all this time? There so many books I have loved in my lifetime, loved and loved. Some of them evoke worlds that are completely outside of my experience. Some of them offer some familiar and satisfying similarities—like seeing a cousin on the street, instead of your own face in the mirror. But I think a writer who has yet to find the place where she can say, Yes, this is exactly the place where I belong, will write her way toward a home on the page. And then toward another one after that. But okay, okay—in my younger years, I read Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek a ridiculous number of times.
If your book was a famous musician who would it be?
It might be Janis Joplin in her prime, except probably not on drugs, in a mutually enthusiastic collaboration with a mariachi band. After all, she was from Texas, and she had the lungs for it. Similarly, cultures collide in this book, and sometimes it’s messy, and sometimes it’s weird, and sometimes it just works.
What comfort food could a reader pair with your book?
If you need some support for the long haul (emotional, physical), I suggest the Mexican home cooking of someone you know well; a short stack of enchiladas with chile colorado and a fried egg on top will do. If you’re in a hurry and not very picky, hit up Chico’s Tacos in El Paso.
In what ways has access (or little to no access) to Hispanic/Latinx/e literature defined you as a writer?
I had that typical Gen X, Southwest U.S. public school literature class student experience of reading Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima…. …and literally nothing else by Latinx authors. I didn’t even discover Cisneros until college (or maybe later—I suspect I discovered her in a used book store; in the meantime, I read García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, like everyone else). And that’s it. I didn’t know who or what to look for, so I started writing what I thought I was looking for, with my own particular bicultural twist. Now, even when I stray from that world in my writing, the sensibilities behind the writing are still informed by the urge to bridge this gap. That gap worked its way into my DNA, and the cells will probably be trying to repair themselves for the rest of my life.
Where can readers keep up with your work?
All roads lead to my website (almagarciaauthor.com), but you can also find me at:
twitter.com/Writer_Alma
Instagram: @almagarciaauthor
Thank you to Alma Garcia for taking the time to chat with me about her book! Please please make sure you purchase a copy (or request your local library carry a copy) #SupportLatinxLit!
Alma García’s award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. She is a past recipient of a fellowship from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from El Paso and later from Albuquerque, she now lives in Seattle, where she teaches fiction writing, offers her services as a manuscript consultant, and serves as an artists’ and writers’ mentor through the Artists Up program. All That Rises is her first novel.
Synopsis for All That Rises:
In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie's husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez's brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado--life, American style.
What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways--all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities--as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce--never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong--within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
I've seen Alma García's book on Instagram, but your post/interview gave so much interesting info. The glowing blurbs for the book are from a few of my favorite authors, so how could I not read this novel? I ordered the e-book!
First, thank you Lupita. Please don't feel like you have to apologize how you spend your time. I always appreciate what you do share with us and hope no one else is begrudging you.
If we're sharing, I'm in a weird place. Holding space for Palestinians, work made a big announcement that has me looking for new job, and homeowner problems I'm privileged to have, but still an unexpected expense. They have each woken me up in the middle of the night and all have made me feel like I'm not doing enough. But it does have me flying through books to help me process for little pockets of joy.